Search result ranking

Abstract

A search engine (50, 35, 45,103) can find content items in a first corpus (6, 30), and return search results to the user as items ranked according to mentions in a second corpus (7, 77, 87, 30), of the respective found content items. This introduces a degree of independence or separation between the scope and type of the information for ranking and the scope and type of the content items used for responding to the search query. The second corpus can be limited to human moderated discussion sites, to provide a more reliable measure of how topical is the item. The first corpus can be limited to mobile web pages. The ranking can also involve a count of mentions in plain text referring to the respective found content items, or be according to a social distance between the user and another user, to whom the respective content item is related.

Description

RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application claims the benefit of earlier filed provisional applications having Ser. No. 60 / 946,728 filed 28 Jun. 2007 entitled “Ranking Search Results Using a Measure of Buzz, and Ser. No. 60 / 946,730 filed 28 Jun. 2007 entitled “Social distance search ranking”.[0002]This application also relates to five earlier US patent applications, namely Ser. No. 11 / 189,312 filed 26 Jul. 2005, published as US 2007 / 00278329, entitled “processing and sending search results over a wireless network to a mobile device”; Ser. No. 11 / 232,591, filed Sep. 22, 2005, published as US 2007 / 0067267 entitled “Systems and methods for managing the display of sponsored links together with search results in a search engine system” claiming priority from UK patent application no. GB0519256.2 of Sep. 21, 2005, published as GB2430507; Ser. No. 11 / 248,073, filed 11 Oct. 2005, published as US 2007 / 0067304, entitled “Search using changes in prevalence of content items on the web”; Ser. No...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0019]This can help enable improved ranking based on the likelihood that a level of interest in the content items is related to how close is the other user.

Problems solved by technology

As is acknowledged in U.S. Pat. No. 6,751,612 (Schuetze), because of the vast amount of distributed information currently being added daily to the Web, maintaining an up-to-date index of information in a search engine is extremely difficult.

Also, search engines do not typically use a user's personal search information in updating the search engine index.

The first problem is the slow scan rate at which search engines currently look for new and changed information on a network.

To reach high network scan rates on the order of a day costs too much for the bandwidth flowing to a small number of locations on the network.

The second problem is that current search engines do not incorporate new content into their “rankings” very well.

Because new content inherently does not have many links to it, it will not be ranked very high under Google's PageRank™ scheme or similar schemes.

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